Industry experts took on PromaxBDA’s challenge of presenting a master class in a mere seven minutes, giving a packed house at the Paley Center for Media in Manhattan tons of tips in a very short time during Tuesday’s Sports Media Marketing Summit.

Many of the day’s panelists discussed how they had tapped into social media to promote their program or their brand partners. Shared interests are the key to effective social media, says Dan Wade, SVP of activation, at St. Louis, Mo.-based Lockerdome, which offers an interest-based social-media platform.

“The core layer on social media’s social graph is friendship, but if those friends also share your interests, that’s phenomenal,” he says. Lockerdome’s philosophy is that the social graph – in which people connect because of who they know – offers limited connections, but the interest graph – in which people connect because of what they like – offers a virtually unlimited audience.

“On Twitter, I want you to be interested in my content,” he says. “I don’t care if you know me.” That philosophy played out across the panel as different people described how and why their campaigns worked on different social-media platforms. For example, Discovery saw a huge social media success with this summer’s broadcast of Nik Wallenda’s death-defying tightrope walk across the Grand Canyon on June 23, 2013. While the live event ultimately attracted record-setting ratings to Discovery, it also illustrated “how to expect the best by planning for the worst.”

In fact, Discovery spent so much time planning for the worst – in this case, Wallenda potentially plunging to his death on the canyon floor far below – that the team almost forgot to plan for the best. Luckily for everyone, that was the only scenario the team needed as Wallenda successfully completed his 1,400-foot pass on a two-inch wide wire some 1,500 feet in the air.

Even so, team Discovery practiced the production of the live event so many times that “we got to a point where it was in our muscle memory,” Goldberg said.

Ultimately, Wallenda’s walk taught Discovery many other lessons, first of which was that live programming is a highly effective way to capture an audience’s attention. The program scored a total of 13 million viewers and was Discovery’s highest-rated broadcast program ever, generating 1.3 million Tweets on that Sunday, making it the week’s most social show.

Discovery used all of that attention to its advantage, launching its new show, “Naked & Afraid,” right afterwards as well as giving the audience the first look at its new Shark Week promo, which ultimately went viral.

Now, “we’re obsessed with live in any way, shape or form,” Goldberg says. “That’s the downside of all the tech – reruns don’t rerun as well as they used to so we are constantly having to freshen things up.”

While A&E’s “Duck Dynasty” doesn’t air live, per se, A&E treats it much like a live show, with a whole “social media lab” in place to manage and measure the show’s social presence while it’s on the air. “Duck Dynasty” is cable’s second most popular show, with nearly 12 million viewers tuning in for its August premiere.

“Nothing beats live,” says Guy Slattery, EVP of marketing for A&E, Bio Channel and Crime & investigation Network. “Even though our show is prerecorded, we do everything we can to make it feel like a live event.”

While some of “Duck Dynasty"’s cast understands and uses social media, arguably the show’s most colorful character, Uncle Si, neither knows nor cares about Twitter.

“We found that most talent wants to be on social media naturally,” says Slattery. “We’re never going to make Si or Phil be on social media, but we can still capitalize on them. The other guys just want to do it. It’s their show. It’s not something that we negotiate with our talent.”

While neither Si nor Phil type, Si in particular frequently trends on the social-media platform, and that’s because A&E has been smart enough to capture his catchy phrases (“Work hard. Nap Hard.” “I sting like a butterfly, I punch like a flea.”) and Tweet them out.

“’Duck Dynasty’ is one of the most social shows on TV, even though there’s nothing young, female or urban about it,” says Slattery. It’s just the nature of the show. It wasn’t something we could have predicted.”

Neither could have NBC Sports predicted the success of its long-form video, featuring Jason Sudeikis playing Coach Lasso, a misplaced “football” coach in London. The nearly five-minute video quickly went viral last summer, and currently has scored more than six million unique views.

That video, one part of a multi-pronged promotional campaign for NBC Sports’ Premier League Soccer, was an integral part of driving viewing. Over the course of the fall, ratings for Premier League Soccer grew 92%, its Facebook page likes increased by 8200% and the campaign scored more than one billion impressions worldwide, half of which were earned media, according to Bill Bergofin, NBC Sports’ SVP of marketing.

“We had to do more than promote programming. We needed to provide a cultural movement,” said Bergofin.

Caption: Discovery’s Laurie Goldberg, LockerDome’s Dan Wade, Contagious’ Nick Parish, NBC Sports’ Bill Bergofin and A&E’s Guy Slattery discuss their brands in the first panel of PromaxBDA’s Sports Media Marketing Summit at the Paley Center for Media in New York City.

[Image courtesy of PromaxBDA]

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